My 87 year old
mother has wintered for over two decades in a mobile home at a mobile home park
in Rockledge, Florida. In fact, the
mobile home is permanent because it never moved from its location. Even so she
needs to purchase a license plate and an occupancy sticker from the good people
at the State of Florida Department of Transportation.
My mother looks
forward to returning to Florida each winter. Besides better weather than what
we have in Wisconsin, she looks forward to seeing fellow snowbirds from as far
away as Canada who take residence in the mobile home park each year.
Rockledge is located
in the middle of the state of Florida on the Atlantic Coast side near Cape
Canaveral. She can watch rockets launch
from the Cape by simply walking out her front door, looking up at the sky, and staring south. Rockledge was not affected
by Hurricane Michael which wiped out Florida's western panhandle in 2018. However in 2017, Hurricane Irma hit Rockledge
with torrential rain. My mother's mobile
home is on blocks and managed to stay just above the water line for flooding
occurring at the campground. Her shed
containing tools and gardening equipment tried to float away but stayed near
her mobile home thanks to an outside electrical cord which was attached to her
mobile home.
As she has gotten
older and the TSA become meaner, we decided that she should be accompanied when
she winters in Florida and when she returns to Wisconsin in the spring. The TSA check that concerned us the most and
caused us to accompany her to Florida occurred three years ago when she left by
herself from Midway airport in Chicago.
The Midway TSA people essentially strip searched her. That is why we now accompany her on her way
down to Florida in fall and back to Wisconsin in spring. Now that Jean and I
are both retired these trips are less constrained by time and so we can spend
more time in Florida with her. TSA
appears to be less aggressive when three people go through the line together
rather one single, older woman.
We flew down to
Florida from Milwaukee with her on November 6th, the day of the fall
elections. All three of us went through
the TSA pre-check line. The TSA people
were in a generally good mood (I even saw one smile) and we got through with
minimal difficulty. I assume they were
in a fairly good mood despite or because of the election. Because both my mother and I have steel in
our legs from prior leg operations, we did need to go through their XRay
machine and have a wand pass over all parts of our body before we could proceed
to the departure gate.
We stayed for 10
days. She did not appear to mind our intrusion into her Florida routine of
visiting with neighbors, playing cards and bingo, and watching sports. She is a great Brewers, UW football and
basketball, and Packers fan. She is
happy when they win and also critical when they lose. When one of her favorite teams has an
especially painful loss she has a favorite phrase, "They stink!".
After an uneventful
flight, my brother-in-law picked up us three from the Orlando airport and drove us
the last leg to Rockledge. He and my sister, whom live in nearby Melbourne,
opened up her mobile home, turned on her electricity, and made it ready for occupancy. Jean and I stayed with her for our 10 day
stay.
During our stay,
Florida was in one word, hot.
Temperatures each day were in the upper 80s or low 90s and the humidity
was high. Locals said the weather was
extremely hot for November. The air
conditioner in her mobile home ran the entire time we were there. We expected
warm but not hot and so any outdoor activities were limited because of the
heat.
At the campground we
me her neighbors, had cook-outs, played cards, and relaxed. Her friends organize a card game called
Euchre, twice a week. For a dollar, one
can win as much as four dollars after playing 64 hands of Euchre. All three of us participated in a Euchre
tournament and each of us lost our $1 dollar entry fee.
Outside the
campground, we participated in two trivia contests at a local bar with the name
of Cheers, two movies, had a meal with my sister and brother-in-law and toured
the Kennedy Space Center.
She looked forward
to the trivia contest. We found the
trivia contest at Cheers last spring when we went down to bring her back to
Wisconsin. The trivia contest is a
series of 20 questions from a local DJ named Mike. It costs nothing to enter. At our first try on November 7th, our team,
my mother, me, and Jean, against 10 other teams led until the last
question. The last question was a
Florida question regarding the length of one of the interstates in
Florida. We failed the question
miserably and missed out on a $15 gift certificate to Cheers. Our second try on November 14th, we ended up
near the bottom. But we ate food, drank
beer, and had fun answering questions for two hours. A sample question was, "What country has
the largest number of Roman Catholics per capita?" Our answer to the November 14th questions was
Ireland. The correct answer was
Brazil. After Mike read the correct
answer part of the bar where the winning teams were erupted in applause. She wants us to compete again next May and
win this time.
The most interesting
part of our Florida visit was the NASA Kennedy Space Center. For $50 dollars apiece we had a tour of the
entire property on an air-conditioned bus, saw exhibits for the Mercury,
Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions, and went to buildings housing an
Apollo rocket and the Atlantis Space Shuttle.
$50 apiece may appear at first sight to be a lot of money but compared
to other tourist sites in Florida such as Disneyworld where admission exceeds
$100, it is a bargain.
The tour bus
operator drove around a portion of the 144,000 acre property. We could see the building where rockets are
put together, Launch Pad 39, where most of the launches occur, and the SpaceX
launch pad which is NASA's future. NASA
wants to focus on Mars and not the moon so it has entered into
public/government partnerships for moon flights. We were told we could take pictures of anything
other than the guard shacks. Pictures of
the guard shacks meant automatic confiscation of your camera. We also saw an alligator and the fencing NASA
uses to keep alligators away from the launch pads. The fencing is about 7 feet
high with concertina wire on top and is tilted outward because alligators can
climb a fence and get into the complex if the fence position would be straight
up and down.
Ideally it takes two
days to tour the Kennedy Space Center because of the number of exhibits and the
distance between exhibits. We had one day.
NASA developed shows regarding each of its development projects. We went from Mercury to Apollo to the Space
Shuttle. NASA actually had the original
control room for one of the Apollo missions functioning during one of its presentations. The size of the Mercury rocket and capsule
was minute compared to the hardware developed for the Apollo and Space Shuttle
missions. You did not realize how big
an Apollo rocket or a space shuttle was until you walked the entire length of
both in their separate exhibits. According to NASA over 2.5 million parts had
to work flawlessly in order to have successful Apollo and Space Shuttle
missions.
NASA had a separate exhibit directed to the
astronauts who died in the failure of
Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger.
All told the Kennedy
Space Center was the highlight of our Florida trip. It was slightly higher than the time my
mother rejoiced after supplying our trivia team a correct answer to a Cheers
trivia question.
Based on our ten day
stay with my mother, I now better understand her six months in Florida. Where else can you swelter during a Wisconsin
winter, play cards, meet interesting people, watch a missile launch, and disparage
a Wisconsin sports team when they lose?
